Mr. Sorley McCaughey:

That is true. There is a need for a body that is representative and inclusive. That is the basis on which developing countries' concerns can be articulated more effectively. There is a demand from African countries, in particular, and other countries of the global south to have such a body established. There is, of course, a degree of resistance among European countries to it. It is not uniform, across-the-board resistance, but there are some who are very attached to the sovereignty of their own tax systems. As I tried to articulate to Senator Walsh, we need to start looking at taxation less as a competitive race to the bottom and more as something that could generate benefits through mutual co-operation. The only body in which that can happen is one that is UN-led.

The issue of tax avoidance might be a conversation for another day. I will point, however, to the IMF data released last week showing that $210 billion is lost each year to developing countries as a consequence of tax avoidance. Those numbers speak for themselves. "Tax avoidance" is a phrase that is bandied about a lot and the concept is generally put forward as being entirely legal. There is an increasing body of work which would question that. We only say it is legal because we do not know if it is illegal; it has not actually been tested to see whether or not it is illegal. It is very important to move away from the idea that tax avoidance is always legal. There are many tax avoidance schemes with which we are all very familiar that could ultimately be proven to be illegal, but they never get the exposure we have been asking for to determine whether or not they are, in fact, legal. This goes back to the question of transparency around the activities of multinationals. Let us get them out in the open through a country-by-country reporting standard, which would allow us to build a bigger and clearer picture of what these tax avoidance schemes are all about. Let them be stood up to public scrutiny to see whether they are actually legitimate in the laws of the land and in the eyes of citizens.

The question of how the money is spent is a very important one. During a visit to Dublin in February this year, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights made the observation that more than any Green Paper or White Paper, one can tell a government's real priorities by how it taxes people, who it incentivises and who it disincentives. How a government spends its money tells one all one needs to know. How the money is spent is the other side of how it is collected, and we need to see these two issues as very much two sides of the same coin.

There was a question about the role of NGOs in the Addis Ababa negotiations. Some members of Dóchas are being included in the official Irish delegation, while other NGOs will be attending in their own right. I expect they will all be working very closely together in pursuit of many of the issues we have detailed in our paper today. Indeed, my expectation is that there will be close collaboration between the official delegation and civil society. Let us say it will be a collaboration that is both mutually critical and mutually supportive.